


daughter of the sea

by lilacsilver



Series: daughter of the sea [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, F/M, Merpeople, Name magic, not compliant with anything else, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-27 13:49:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10023566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsilver/pseuds/lilacsilver
Summary: The mermaid named Darcy has seen a lot in her lifetime, but she's never met anyone like Steve Rogers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some of you may recognize the first two chapters of this, on account of I posted them forever ago, lost my motivation, then deleted them out of shame. But now they're back, shortly to be followed by chapters three through the rest of them. (The exact number is a mystery even to me!)

The light of the moon falls upon the narrow little island. Waves crash on one side in stark contrast to the stillness of the other. Here the frigid gulf sits hardly a hundred yards from a quiet bay.

            And here -- in defiance of all that the world thinks it knows -- lives one of the last mermaids. Her hair is dark, her scales deep blue. She had been called a beauty once, long ago, when the seas were lawless and the sailors easily swayed by songs from the water. She had lived somewhere else in those days, closer to her mother’s family, but they had all gone on to wherever it was mermaids went when their time was over.

            She is left alone in this place for the most part, save for the humans who bring their sleek black boat on nights like these when the moon is at its brightest. Sometimes they collect water in little jars. Sometimes they just watch her swim, or talk to her about how she’s been since they last came.

            They are here tonight, all of them anxious in a way she has never seen them. She approaches the boat.

            “We’ve got a problem,” one of them says when he sees her. “We have to move you.”

            “This is my home,” she says. “I don’t want to leave my home.”

            “You don’t have much of a choice,” he says. “There’s been a massive oil spill. You understand oil?”

            She doesn’t, but she hears death in the word. Death she understands. The man shakes his head.

            “The point is, you’re in trouble. The sooner we get you out of here, the better.”

            She pulls herself onto the boat, but they have to help her into the tank they brought with them. Out of the water she’s got all the grace of a newly-hatched gull, so the assistance is necessary and welcome.

From here she cannot see the home she is leaving behind, and knows that if she could cry, she would. The boat rumbles all around her, suddenly in motion and gaining speed.

\--

            She drifts but does not sleep. When she comes back to herself, she is in another, larger tank lit by unnatural lights. The water tastes strange; it is close to the water of her home, but something is missing and something else has been added. She doesn’t like it.

            One of the men from the boat is standing above the tank, looking down at her.

            “Where have you brought me?” she asks.

            “We’re in a SHIELD facility. You’ll be safe here.” That’s hardly an answer, but it’s all he gives her before walking away. She studies her new surroundings with growing displeasure; it may be safe, but everything about it is wrong.

            She expects to be left alone, the same as before, but that isn’t to be. Men and women in white coats come and ask her questions and stare at her. They are always talking to themselves and each other, never to her.

            “Enough!” she cries, one day. “Either explain to me the purpose of this, or leave!”

            She is angry for the first time in her long, long life. An angry mermaid is a force to fear, all sharp teeth and poison. The men and women scatter.

            They do not return. She does not know how long she has been here, separated as she is from the sun and moon that could tell her. She swims in circles, sings to herself all the songs her mother taught her, and no one comes.

            Until _he_ does. He is beautiful, she thinks, a man worthy of a daughter of the wild water. She takes pity on the tired look in his ocean-blue eyes, the slump of his shoulders.

            “Sit with me a while,” she urges, ignoring his apologetic explanation that he must have taken a wrong turn, he’s looking for something else. “Tell me your story.”

            She pushes aside the instinct to drag him in, to do as mermaids have always done to men. The sailors of old were easily caught, so eager to see a woman’s smile again that they ignored the sharp teeth behind it, but this man looks as though he’d be stronger than ten of them together. So she does not sing the sweet lure-songs, nor flutter and beckon.

            He sits. She learns his name – Steve Rogers – and struggles to remember her own. No one has spoken it in a hundred years and more.

            “Darcy,” she finally says. “I am Darcy.”

\--

            Steve visits her occasionally from then on. He tells her things she suspects no one else has heard, and listens to her tales of the seven seas in the days when they were truly wild.

            “I used to act as lookout for pirates,” she says. “Well, a pirate. Rackham and I had a deal.”

            “Didn’t he get caught?”

            “He broke his word to me, so I broke mine to him. Never trust a pirate, love.”

            He nods seriously, as though she’s imparted great wisdom. “If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you…?”

            “I’m five hundred years old,” she says with a smile. “And I’ll be here long after you’re gone. Mermaids only die when they choose to.”

            “And you think you won’t choose to?”

            She laughs. “I’ll go when it’s time. By mermaid standards I’m still very young.”

            They talk a while longer, and then he’s called away. She watches the door shut behind him and wishes she weren’t limited to this tank. The magic that let her mother, all her ancestors, walk on land to choose the men who would sire their daughters needs seawater to work. Not this water altered by humans, nor the bright lights that poorly simulate the sun.

\--

            Steve doesn’t visit for a while. Darcy is unconcerned; he had warned her he might have to leave for long stretches of time.

            She only knows something is amiss when the lights go out, leaving her in such darkness as she has never experienced. There are awful sounds, the rending of metal and the cries of the dying. And then…then a wall explodes inward, shattering one end of her tank.

            She hasn’t seen proper sunlight in far too long, and yearns toward it. The water flooding out of her tank, past the broken wall, carries her out into the unconfined river.

            This water is awful, worse than the water in the tank, but she pushes onward. She remembers her grandmother telling her all rivers reach the ocean. Maybe she’ll find her way home.

           

           


	2. Chapter 2

_Somewhere near Port Royal, Jamaica. 1530._

~~

            “When will I get my color, Mama?” Darcy asks. She is forty years old by human standards, but still a child. The longevity of mermaids means things take far more time for them than for humans, but the impatience of children, it seems, is universal. Darcy looks at her juvenile scales, the color of dry sand, and imagines them in a rainbow of other colors.

            “You need not rush to grow,” her mother says serenely. “It will come in time, as it does for us all.”

            Her mother’s scales are dolphin-gray. Darcy hopes for something more exciting: purple, maybe, or red.

            “You will be beautiful no matter the color you have, my love,” her mother tells her. Darcy tucks herself in close to her mother’s side and watches a ship set sail from the island.

\--

_Florida Keys. 1680._

~~

            Darcy is old enough now that she has heard nearly all of her mother’s wisdom twice over, and she would beg to hear it again if it meant her mother would stay.

            “I have given you all that I know, my love,” the elder says. “There is one thing yet left.”

            “Tell me,” Darcy whispers. She does and does not want to hear it, because this will be the last thing her mother ever tells her.

            “Someday you will find the man worthy of you,” her mother says. “Do not give him your true name, or your fate will become his and you will never be free of him again.”

\--

_Potomac River. Present day._

~~

            Darcy surfaces from the water to breathe. Fires burn on the riverbank. Twisted metal curves over the flames and down into the water, and she no longer cares if she is seen. The shipwrecks of old are nothing compared to this destruction.

            She swims on, head above the water, until she spots one man dragging another onto the riverbank. He has an arm of metal. He leaves the other man there and doesn’t look back, and she swims closer.

            It’s Steve. He’s gravely injured and unresponsive when she calls out. With difficulty, she hauls herself onto the bank beside him and waits. Her journey home no longer seems to matter so much; right here and now is everything of importance. Everything beyond Steve – the fires, the death and destruction – slips away from her thoughts, inconsequential and meaningless.

            She recalls her mother’s final warning and jolts. She had given Steve her true name the day they met, and now…now she understands what her mother meant. Going home, leaving all this, is no longer an option. In her carelessness, she had tied her fate and her life to his.

            He is dying. She reaches for him and holds on, waiting for the last spark of his life to go out and take her with it. Her eyes slip closed…

\--

            …and snap open again at the sound of shouting and high wind, an untold amount of time later. Steve’s heart is still beating, but ever slower, and she doesn’t protest when the man called Fury says they can still save him.

            “What about the mermaid?” the red-haired woman says. “What do we do with her?”

            “Get Rogers to the hospital. I’ll handle her.”

            “Please,” Darcy whispers. “You can’t take me back to the ocean. Not now. He knows my name. I have to…I have to…”

            The red-haired woman eyes her suspiciously, but says nothing, and turns to supervise the people carrying Steve away.

            “I don’t think you’ve got much of a choice,” Fury says. “You’re going back home as fast as I can get you there.”

            “They said…said there was an oil spill. It wasn’t safe.”

            Fury laughs, short and sharp and joyless. “That’s what they told you? Good news is your home’s perfectly safe. Bad news is you got swindled by the same kind of lies as the rest of us.”

            She summons the last of her strength and bares her teeth. “Then I will go home long enough to be healthy again, and I will come back, and we will tear them apart.”

            “We?”

            “Steve and I. I…it’s time to go, I think.”

            Fury carries her to the noisy flying machine – the helicopter, he calls it – and they head south. Her island is hundreds of miles away, he tells her, but flying is far faster than swimming.

\--

            “Tell the Captain he can find me here when he is well again, and I will help him,” she says to Fury just before he goes.

            “How exactly are you gonna do that when you can’t leave the water?”

            “Mermaids have secrets as old as the sea. Trust that, even if you trust nothing else in this world.”

            She grins at him in farewell, though it is hardly a friendly look. Mermaids are predators, and her smile is bloodthirsty now that she knows who her enemies are. They will learn to fear what she can do.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry that this took so long, and that it's such a short chapter! It fought me every step of the way, through multiple complete rewrites, and I don't want to deal with it anymore so here it is. Hopefully the next chapter doesn't take as long.

Darcy drifts through the following days, wondering if Fury passed on her message. Her rage has not subsided; if anything, it is stronger than it was. When – she doesn’t allow herself to say _if_ – Steve comes, she will let it carry her into the fight. His enemies are hers now, and they will fall before her. So she waits, and makes her plans, and watches the sun rise and fall a dozen and a half more times before she decides Steve must not be coming.

She wastes no more time, but weaves the spell that will change her. It _burns_ , and for long minutes afterward she lies slumped against the wet sand, breathing through the pain. The rumble of an approaching boat rouses her, and she looks up warily. It’s not the small, fast kind her enemies favored, but that means little. She doesn’t trust this red-and-gold craft, at least until it becomes obvious Steve is one of the people on board.

It’s hard to figure out how to swim without her fins, but she manages to get to the boat once the engine cuts off. Then Steve is there, helping her climb aboard and quickly averting his eyes; she accepts the loose, shapeless dress that one of the others hands her and puts it on to spare any further blushes. She supposes she’ll have to get used to human standards of acceptable behavior, and do so quickly. 

Steve introduces her to Tony Stark, Sam Wilson, and Maria Hill. Tony claims he’s only here because he owns the boat; he reminds her of nothing so much as a chatty seabird with the running commentary he seems to feel is necessary. The other three ignore him, and Darcy follows their example. She focuses instead on the aches still coursing dully through her altered muscles for the rest of the ride.

The marina is quiet when Maria, at the helm, guides the boat into a slip. Darcy stumbles against Steve when she disembarks, and despite what Tony and his waggling eyebrows seem to think, it’s not on purpose. Swimming with her new limbs was one thing; walking is nearly impossible. 

The renewed pain brings tears to her eyes. Mother never told her about this aspect of the transformation, and she hopes it’s only temporary. How will she be of any use to Steve if she can barely move under her own power?

He has to carry her to the waiting car, and lets her weep against his shoulder once everyone’s seated and they start off.  
\--  
The ride to the airport takes a while, even with how fast the car is moving. Tony provides her with identification that he says will get her through the security line. She assumes the little square image of an unhappy-looking woman is supposed to be her, but she doesn’t know where he got it from.

“What does it say?” she asks. A long pause follows her words as the others realize what she’s always known: mermaids have no need for a written language. She can speak a number of different tongues in varying degrees of fluency, but written words are just so much nonsense to her.

“…We’ll set you up with some literacy software later,” Tony finally says. “Just show that card to the security agent when they ask for it.”

They make it through the security line with no bother, and are soon on board the Stark Industries jet. Just like the identification card, this means nothing to her, but it’s comfortable. She settles into a seat and gazes out the window at the land far below, marveling at it. Her flight with Fury in the helicopter was nothing like this.

Steve comes and sits next to her after spending quite a while in a whispered conversation with the others.

“You said you would help us,” he says. “How do you plan to do that?”

“I told you once that I had a deal with Calico Jack,” she replies. “I can keep watch.”

His expression darkens. “This isn’t the seventeenth century anymore, Darcy. You can’t just watch the horizon for sails and expect that to be enough.”

“Of course it isn’t enough.” She smiles, and it’s not a pleasant smile. “I’ve been employing poison for centuries, Steve. Quite a lot of fish are toxic, you know.”

He stares at her. “We can’t just kill Hydra agents outright. Not if they have information we need.”

“If they give up what they know in time, they won’t die,” she says. “They’ll receive treatment and go to prison. If they refuse, then they _will_ die.”

There’s a moment of silence, then: “I vote we keep her away from Romanoff as long as possible.”

Of course the others have been listening in.


	4. Chapter 4

The guest suite in Stark Tower to which Darcy is assigned has an excellent view. She likes to look out at the city, to wonder about the people who live and work in it. Humanity has always fascinated and awed her.

Pepper Potts is no exception. She’d hardly paused at the notion of housing an erstwhile mermaid; the guest suite’s closet quickly gets stocked with clothes and shoes, there’s plenty to eat in the kitchen, and pleasant-smelling soaps and other necessities in the bathroom. Darcy soon finds that she likes wearing tee shirts and jeans, or dresses and soft leggings, but the wretched inventions called bras that she must also wear are to be endured rather than enjoyed.

The others leave her be to adjust, and she spends a great deal of that time sampling the food in the kitchen and investigating the many possibilities available on the massive television. After five centuries of eating raw fish (and the occasional unlucky sailor), with very little entertainment beyond watching the fish she didn’t eat going about their short fishy lives, she considers movies and coffee and chocolate-covered pretzels to be a step up. 

Jarvis, Tony’s ever-present artificial assistant, is likewise an improvement over her old life. He instructs her on how to operate the coffee maker, the oven, and a dozen other things besides. He’s also quite willing to help with the literacy software Tony had promised her.

The lessons are very simple, and more than a little monotonous. Jarvis finds recordings of more advanced lectures on the ins and outs of the English language after she asks him why _cough_ and _rough_ don’t rhyme, and she listens to these as she practices writing. Fourteen days into her new life, in the middle of a lecture on the influence of the Norman Conquest, there comes a knock on the door. 

“Who’s there, Jarvis?” 

“Captain Rogers. Shall I let him in?”

“Yes. Yeah.” She’s begun to shift toward the modern, informal speech patterns she hears on television, because these days no one really talks like they did even a century ago. Failure to adapt to that will stick out and make people take notice of her, which she doesn’t want. 

Steve joins her in the living room a moment later, looking grave and tired. She pauses the recording and sets down her pencil and pad of yellow paper, to better focus on him.  
“I’ve been talking to the others,” he says, “and we don’t think it would be the best idea for you to be involved in interrogations. Hydra knows who you are, but we don’t want them to know you’re here.”

“You mean you don’t want them to know what I’ve done.” She gestures needlessly at her bare feet, and he nods. He’s still just standing there, and she sighs.

“Sit down, Steve. I can’t keep looking up at you, my neck will cramp.”

He obeys. “Sorry. We could use you, though, if you still want to help.”

“Of course,” she agrees immediately. “Whatever I can do.”

“We’ve got to build a new support team for the Avengers now that SHIELD is gone. Hill says she’ll put you to work right away if you’re willing.”

Darcy nods, but warns, “I don’t know how useful I’ll be, at least to start out. I still have a lot to learn.”

She holds up the yellow pad as proof. She now knows the letters that make up her name – both the real one and the false identity Tony cooked up for her – and a growing number of words, but her handwriting is shaky. That doesn’t seem to bother Steve, who smiles at it and then at her.

“Looks like you’re learning pretty fast.”

She smiles back, and tosses the pad back onto the coffee table. They lapse into a somewhat awkward silence before she remembers that human etiquette dictates offering food to guests.

“Would you like something to drink? Or a snack? Or…what time is it? It’s almost dinner time, isn’t it? I could make some pasta or something. Jarvis helped me figure out the stove.” It all comes out in a rush, and poor Steve looks a little overwhelmed by the end. 

“…How about just a glass of water?” he suggests. “I think Tony’s planning to order enough pizza to feed an army, if you feel like joining everyone for dinner in a little while."

Darcy considers it, and nods. She’s spent centuries isolated, near-silent, and lonely, and now those days are over. If she is to survive, to _live_ , she will need to forge the alliances waiting for her a few floors up.

Steve waits and drinks his water while she puts on clothes more suitable for a group dinner than the pajamas she’s been wearing all day. A comfortable, soft red sweater and jeans seem to fit the requirements, so she finds a pair of shoes to finish the outfit and hurries to rejoin Steve.

\--

If the others are surprised to see her, they quickly hide it. Steve introduces her to Natasha and Clint, who both watch her with no small amount of wariness. Darcy hopes to earn their trust in time, but for now she does her best to pretend they aren’t tracking her every move.

More than a dozen large pizzas sit in a line on the kitchen counter, and everyone serves themselves. Darcy wrinkles her nose at the anchovy-and-olive -- she never wants to eat another fish as long as she lives -- and opts instead for as much of the ‘veggie lover’s’ as she can get away with. The others eye her laden plate.

“If any of you had to eat nothing but seafood for five hundred years, you’d get attached to vegetables too,” she explains serenely. “Would someone pass me a soda, please?”

Steve does so, even helpfully popping the top of the can for her. She thanks him with a smile and takes a seat at the table, waiting for the others to fill their own plates and sit down before she starts eating.

Conversation is slow to start, with everyone focused on their food, but eventually Natasha speaks up.

“So. Darcy. Why was it so important to you to stay with Steve?” Her voice, like her eyes, is hard and unwavering.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Darcy sips at her soda, affecting unconcern.

“You told Fury not to take you back. You said ‘he knows my name.’ I want to know what your game is.”

Darcy drops the nonchalant act. Drops the veil of humanity she has slowly been stitching together. When she meets Natasha’s eyes again, there’s nothing but the ageless ocean in her own, cold and deep and wild. When she speaks, her voice is the crash of waves against a cliff.

“I don’t play games, spiderling. I chose him, and I gave him my true name, and I will die when he dies.”

A long and terrible silence follows her words. When she stands and walks away from the table, no one stops her.


	5. Author's Note

Hi, y'all.

As you've guessed from the title, this isn't an update. I've made the decision to stop writing this story, difficult as that is. I realized after the last chapter that I've kind of written myself into a corner, and I'm not sure how to get out of it. In any case, if you've read "without the sea," you already know what my ultimate goal was for this 'verse.

The other reason behind my decision is that there are other stories I want to tell, and I can't do that if this WIP is still hanging over my head.

I'm sorry, peeps. I know a lot of you loved mermaid-Darcy as much as I did.


End file.
